2026 Summer Interns: Vespa.ai open-source Software Development
At Vespa.ai we help our users run Big data + AI, online.
We seek summer interns who are passionate about coding and solving real-world problems within Machine Learning, performance, UI, LLMs, use-case sample applications and operations of large systems on AWS and GCP. We use:
- C++, Java
- JavaScript/TypeScript, Mantine, React, FastHTML
- Go, Python
- ONNX, LangChain, Huggingface
- Podman, Docker
We code using Mac or Linux laptops, using tools of our own choice. Everything we do is auto-tested and released to DockerHub daily.
Join our summer of 2026 intern team to work on a popular open-source project - github.com/vespa-engine/vespa has 10M+ downloads and is rapidly growing. Our summer interns always write code, and we release it with this - this is your way to make a change!
The 2025 intern projects are not yet set in stone - we try to adapt to the passions of our interns, and this space moves so fast. You are welcome to suggest and work on projects that you can build on in your master thesis or continue part-time with us. Ideas:
- Use a Large Language Model to generate data for automated tuning of search and recommendation use cases.
- Build user interfaces using Mantine/TypeScript or FastHTML/Python to manage large clusters of nodes.
- Build tools in JavaScript/Python for detailed trace analysis of millisecond query performance, with performance optimization hints.
- Implement an automated relevance toolkit for Hybrid Search, train models to balance ranking profiles: BM25, vector search ++
- Use LangChain or Vercel AI SDK with Vespa and build a full-stack demo application to implement Retrieval Augmented Generation like search.vespa.ai.
- Implement case studies using Jupyter Notebooks, with great-looking graphics, animations, code, and text. Work on our Python APIs.
- Implement a full-stack vector-search sample application using GCP, Kubernetes, and Next.js.
- Develop a full performance testing suite using Grafana Cloud k6.
- Build a Vespa API in Go for use in AWS Lambdas / GCP functions for data access, queries, and management.
Minimum Qualifications
Computer Science (or similar) student. Experience with one of:
- Java
- C++
- JavaScript
- Go
- Python
Bonus:
- Familiarity with performance measurement, analysis and tuning methodologies
- Knowledge/experience with GCP, AWS, Azure
About Vespa.ai
Vespa is a fully featured search engine and vector database. It supports vector search (ANN), lexical search, and search in structured data, all in the same query. Integrated machine-learned model inference allows you to apply AI to make sense of your data in real time. Together with Vespa's proven scaling and high availability, this empowers you to create production-ready search applications at any scale, and with any combination of features.
Recommendation, personalization and targeting involve evaluating recommender models over content items to select the best ones. Vespa lets you build applications that do this online, typically combining fast vector search and filtering with evaluation of machine-learned models over the items. This makes it possible to make recommendations specifically for each user or situation, using utterly up-to-date information.
The Vespa.ai developer team is located in Trondheim, Norway. Our users and customers are #1 in e-commerce, content, and financial services, globally.
Please attach university transcripts for our evaluation. Apply before December 12th, 2025.
Read more about our internships at vespa.ai/students !
Top Skills
What We Do
Vespa.ai operates Vespa Cloud - used by companies to run Big Data serving with AI, online. We maintain the Vespa open-source project, continuously released and used by organizations with high performance, availability, and functional requirements.
We are hiring! See the Jobs page, or visit our website.
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